Lambda Literary Recommends...

The Carousel
A bone-weary, emotionally drained woman shows up one morning at a diner and gas station in a small Northeast town. Intending to refuel on gas and coffee and just keep driving, she is drawn instead to a pile of discarded carousel horses at the junkyard next door. Her find begins a ripple of gossip, mystery, and a restorative journey for the horses, herself, and the curious collection of townspeople taking the tumultuous ride of hope, patience and a chance to grab the brass ring.


Stuck Rubber Baby
Art and story combine powerfully in this lyrical tale of a young man caught in the maelstrom of the civil rights movement and the systematic homophobia of small-town America of the 1960s.



Drama Queers

Polito takes readers back to the 1980s with a wonderfully sweet and hilarious coming-of-age story set in the backstage world of a high school drama club.





The Salt Ecstasies
The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark Doty.

James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White’s untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned.

Smothered in Hugs
Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction of one of America's greatest writers. Cooper has written on grave social issues, producing touchstone pieces for a generation of readers. His obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs offer portraits that are both crystallizing and appropriately indefinite. His reckonings of contemporary writers are astute and unsparing. And, of course, he serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities—and does so with an acuity and fairness missing from most pop culture criticism.

The More I Owe You
In this mesmerizing debut novel, Michael Sledge creates an intimate portrait of the beloved poet Elizabeth Bishop--of her life in Brazil and her relationship with her lover, the dazzling, aristocratic Lota de Macedo Soares. Sledge artfully draws from Bishop's lifelong correspondences and biography to imagine the poet's intensely private world, revealing the literary genius who lived in conflict with herself both as a writer and as a woman. A seemingly idyllic existence in Soares's glass house in the jungle gives way to the truth of Bishop's lifelong battle with alcoholism, as well as her eventual status as one of modernism's most prominent writers. Though connected to many of the most famous cultural and political figures of the era, Soares too is haunted by her own demons. As their secrets unfold, the sensuous landscape of Rio de Janeiro, the rhythms of the samba and the bossa nova, and the political turmoil of 1950s Brazil envelop Bishop in a world she never expected to inhabit. The More I Owe You is a vivid portrait of two brilliant women whose love for one another pushes them to accomplish enduring works of art.